Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in a French immigration detention center for deported immigrants, this contribution will focus on the political and moral conflicts involved in the prevention, labelling and management of detainees' self-inflicted mutilations among members of the staff.

Paper long abstract:

This intervention will focus on the management of self-mutilations of detained immigrants awaiting deportation in French immigration detention centers. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in one of those centers, I will describe the struggles that oppose members of the detention staff - police officers, social workers and Human Rights advocates - over the explanation, labelling and prevention of these self-inflicted wounds. These controversies particularly focus on the perceived anxiety of the detainees - presumably the reason for their "acting out" the mutilation - and on the best way to assess and regulate it. More generally, they unfold around a contradiction inherent to immigration detention in a democracy: it is a violent police institution, but also a "humanitarian" realm, where extreme suffering is proscribed and calls fo immediate relief.

I will first describe the "risk assessment system" organized inside the detention center I surveyed, to prevent mutilations through medical expertise of the detainee's state of mind. I will then focus on the practical dilemmas faced by Human Rights advocates who operate inside detention centers on that issue : indeed, they oppose police officers who label self-mutilations as "acts of delinquency" since they take the immigrant's body away from police control, but they still have to work with them to try to avoid mutilations, for humanitarian reasons. On the other hand, these advocates who often consider self-mutilations as "acts of resistance", cannot fully sustain them because of the vital risk they involve.